Countercurricular rhetorical education: reimagining the university from the inside out

ABSTRACT

This essay articulates the theoretical basis for my term “countercurricular,” which denotes college students’ use of curricular and extracurricular learning to craft alternative or oppositional views. The countercurricular highlights how student organizers mobilize history to change the present, especially to inscribe into public memory recurring conflicts between students and university administrations. I examine documents related to the Black Student Union at the University of California, Irvine, and discuss teaching this activist history. Through these textual and pedagogical examples, I demonstrate how countercurricular rhetorical education orients our understanding of how students challenge the oppressions upon which the university is built.

KEYWORDS:

• Student activism
• counterpublics
• campus memory

Notes

1 I have discussed this phenomenon, albeit before naming it “countercurricular,” in “‘We Want to Be Intersectional’: Asian American College Students’ Extracurricular Rhetorical Education,” Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, 23, no. 4 (2021).

2 My definition is informed by Jessica Enoch’s: “any educational program that develops in students a communal and civic identity and articulates for them the rhetorical strategies, language practices, and bodily and social behaviors that make possible their participation in communal and civic affairs.” Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865–1911 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 7–8, Enoch’s emphasis.

3 Shirley Wilson Logan, Liberating Language: Sites of Rhetorical Education in Nineteenth-Century Black America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 9.

4 Anne Ruggles Gere, “Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms: The Extracurriculum of Composition,” College Composition and Communication 45, no. 1 (1994): 75–92.

5 Jens Lloyd, “College Writing and Campus Values: The Nixon Library Debate at UC Irvine,” Literacy in Composition Studies 6, no. 1 (2018): 5.

6 Susan Wells, “Rogue Cops and Health Care: What Do We Want from Public Writing?” College Composition and Communication 47, no. 3 (1996): 326.

7 Jonathan Alexander and Susan C. Jarratt, “Rhetorical Education and Student Activism,” College English 76, no. 6 (2014): 542, my emphasis.

8 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990): 67.

9 Robert Asen, “Seeking the ‘Counter’ in Counterpublics,” Communication Theory 10, no. 4 (2000): 427.

10 Cheryl Flores, “Implement Institutional Resources for Black Students,” change.org, https://www.change.org/p/howard-gillman-implement-institutional-resources-for-black-students

11 Phuc Pham, “Gillman Forces Task Force to Improve Campus Experience for Black Community,” New University, 3 February 2015, https://newuniversity.org/2015/02/03/gillman-forces-task-force-to-improve-campus-experience-for-black-community/

12 Lilibeth Garcia, “The past, present and future of UCI’s Department of African American Studies,” UCI School of Humanities, 17 February 2022, https://www.humanities.uci.edu/news/past-present-and-future-ucis-department-african-american-studies

13 Garcia, “The past, present and future.”

14 Zoë Howes, “UC Irvine, Let’s Do Better: A Discussion with UCI’s Black Student Union,” Her Campus, 19 April 2022, https://www.hercampus.com/school/uc-irvine/uc-irvine-lets-do-better-a-discussion-with-ucis-black-student-union/

15 Alexander and Jarratt, “Rhetorical Education,” 538.

16 Nancy Welch, “Afterword: Science, Politics, and the Messy Arts of Rhetoric,” in Unruly Rhetorics: Protest, Persuasion, and Publics, eds. Jonathan Alexander et al. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), 305.

17 UCI Summer Bridge, “Scholarship Eligibility,” University of California, Irvine, https://summerbridge.due.uci.edu/application/eligibility/

18 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), National Center for Education Statistics, https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/

19 “American Dream,” University of California, Irvine, https://uci.edu/american-dream/